Monochrome: Ajim Juxta - Kanun Gila
MONOCHROME is a collaborative exhibition between Artemis Art and Art Serpong Gallery. The exhibition features six solo showcases, and "Kanun Gila" is Ajim Juxta's first solo exhibition in Indonesia. This collection of works expands Ajim's 'Monument' (Tugu) and 'Monomania' series of works, subsets of his dystopian series of works.
MONOCHROME is a collaborative exhibition between Artemis Art and Art Serpong Gallery. The exhibition features six solo showcases, and "Kanun Gila" is Ajim Juxta's first solo exhibition in Indonesia. This collection of works expands Ajim's 'Monument' (Tugu) and 'Monomania' series of works, subsets of his dystopian series of works.
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Take, for example, the majestic hilly landscapes today laid waste due to humanity’s
need (and often, greed) for the valuable natural resources contained within.
The four Gunungan artworks address this, depicting what remains of natural
megalithic structures damaged and destroyed through harvesting activities,
principal among them, mining.
What were once important geographical markers and reference points in our
socio-cultural history are today in various stages of damage and destruction.
Once exhausted of all valuable resources, these are abandoned in a state of
barren disrepair, a landscape littered with broken monuments.
If monuments are, by definition, icons of remembrance and celebration, exactly
what do these broken monuments celebrate? Hills and mountains, unlike flora,
cannot grow back to their pristine glory. If anything, these broken monuments live
on as testaments to how mankind has damaged the very thing that has sustained
it for millennia here on planet Earth – the environment.
In the Monomania works, this helpless despair manifests itself as layered
brooding emotions, monochromatic layers representing both the concern
environmentalists have today, and the regret Ajim foresees mankind will have in
tomorrow’s world.
Will the smog-choked air, a common sight in metropolitan cities the world over,
even be breathable in our future? Will a “nice day” be one where it’s less grey
than most, if only by a few tonal degrees? Will the world of tomorrow know what
the phrase “clear, blue skies” even means, or will it be something the children of
tomorrow know about merely through history books?
These are among the very serious questions contained in Ajim Juxta’s works. It is
not, however, for the artist to answer. No, his role is to give us pause for thought, a
call for us to consider our past and reconsider our present courses of action; and,
to warn us of what tomorrow may possibly hold, if mankind continues living by the
Code of Madness as we have been, and looking at today, continue to.
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